Open discussion for projects on this forum.

[gyula]

I have pondered on Carroll's problem with connecting the two DC outputs of the two diode bridges in parallel: basically the problem is that he has two different voltage sources and these can only be connected in parallel if the inner resistances and the output amplitudes of the sources are identical. If you connect a 12V and a 12.5V battery in parallel for instance, the 0.5V difference will drive a charging current into the 12V battery and this is a load for 12.5V battery. Maybe such a 'load' appears in Carroll's setup for one of the output coils?
The best is to use a scope and explore the phase and amplitude issues.

Perhaps a simple solution to separate the two voltage sources is to insert a diode in series with the DC output of one of the diode bridges. This diode could block any loading effect by the other source. Such series diode is used at the outputs of solar panels to prevent their backloading effect towards the batteries when there is no sunlight.

Voltan's second drawing is correct I think and should give a solution too, however the DC outputs are added in series. IT is true that the individual DC outputs are available too but with a common + and - connection.

Gyula

[voltan]

hi citfta. this might help with feeding additional coil outputs to the storage cap.
the blue lines and arrows show flow from - to + for the first coil and either polarity input to the ac legs is additive, in voltage, to the 1st coil's.
maybe another fwbr is required to rectify the 1st coils output on the front of this, or maybe try splitting the 1st coils output like you would do a voltage doubler,and run 2 strands of fwbr's. or maybe you have to take phasing into account, or maybe rectification and smoothing of each coil's output is required. lotsa maybe's but it might be worth trying different combinations.
also, for y connected motor coils, a common scheme for car alternators looks like it blocks cross currents, phase to phase,effectively. easily expandable for more than 3 phases and available in 1 block component for 3 phase.
pic 4 is a nifty adaptation.
cheers.

[genessc]

One other idea on magnet orientation Carroll...

Oh one other idea on the magnet orientation on the rotor... what if you take all those ceramic magnets and turn them sideways? they are about as thick as the laminate gap where the old rotor went... so if you keep them spaced about a magnet or so's thickness apart, you'll then be having a curious layout on the perm magnet rotor... Magnets fields are then orthagonal to the coils ends...

That might produce some interesting generation results... anywho just an idea...

Gene

[genessc]

Howdy Carroll,

Yeap, this is the O type laminates versus the EI type laminate. Its also the fact that there are two coils on opposite sides of the O laminates that are connected in a particular way to add the total output.

Also the reason why your circuit is bogging down when you add a Second generator coil to a bridge and out to the Same cap is that in effect the second gen coil is now Added to the inductance of the first gen coil, which from my measurements of them they're at about 150mH per gen coil pair.

Given the inductance ratio I noted, of about 5:1, presumably the driving inductance is ~5times the inductance of just a single gen coil on that particular context of configuration? so its about 750mH or so? (that would keep the 5:1 stepdown inductance ratio noted with the drain pump motor output from itself at 150mH to the 50va secondary which was measured at ~30mH for that Speedup effect under shorting/resistive loading to occur.)

Another thing to consider is at what RPM the drive side is at when you add the second coil... is it up in the ~7200rpm range? or are you down around the 3600rpm range? if its not above a certain RPM then the loading generates a Stalling effect...

I've noted if I have the primary shorted on the trafo connected to the drain pump and I try to Start the drive motor, it refuses to Start. I have to unshort that side and get it up to Speed and THEN short it and then it speeds up and input amps goes down.

Anyways some more details you can maybe make use of. Cheers.

Gene

Hi Dave,

Applied Magnets® Ceramic Magnets 1 7 8" x 7 8" x 3 8" Block C8 Set of 10 | eBay

Here is a link to Ebay where I got my magnets. 10 of them for $8.85. I ordered 3 sets and then weighed them to get all the same weight on the rotor to make balancing easier. Most of them weighed 50 grams with a couple at 52 grams and a couple at 48 grams. I am still fine tuning and adjusting to see what I can learn from this generator. These coils do act strange. Dead shorted they act almost like they aren't even there. But connect them to a bridge to charge a cap and they do load the system a small amount with one coil connected.

The really strange thing I am trying to figure out is when I connect a second coil to a bridge and then try to connect the output of the bridge to the same cap it loads the system down almost to a standstill. Any one of the coils will charge a cap right up with almost no loading. But as soon as I try to add a second coil and bridge to the same cap it loads everything down badly. I thought I had a bad bridge but they all check fine and I have tried swapping several of them around with no change.

I tried connecting the second bridge to an almost dead battery and it did start charging the battery up with a small amount of loading on the system. So it may be possible to use the output of one of the coils to charge the second primary battery on the 3BGS. The top one that always seems to go down the fastest.

I have never gotten this system to speed up under a load but I haven't been trying anything but charging a cap and dumping back to the battery. And then the test I just did of charging a battery directly off the bridge. I guess I need to find some more loads and see what they do on this system.

Carroll

[Turion]

Carroll,

Thanks for the heads up on the magnets. I ordered enough make a brand new rotor but if I pick up a few more at Lowes, I will have enough to finish the rotor I have, so am going to do that tomorrow. I played around with this some this weekend, and I noticed that with the size magnet we are using there is a point during rotation where one magnet is across both ends of the core of the U shaped coil at the same time, and then each end of the core has a different polarity over it, and then the other polarity is across both ends of the core. I can't help but think that there is going to be some kind of reaction somewhere in the system when that happens, and that the spacing on the magnets needs to be such that both faces cannot be bridged by the same polarity of magnet at the same time.

I also want to experiment with a rotor that spins a magnet BETWEEN the two core ends instead of across the ends. I want to know which gives me the best results. I need to find a magnet that is narrow enough to fit in the gap between the two ends and gives me enough clearance so that it doesn't hit. I can find some neos that will work, but haven't had much luck finding ceramics that will. I will keep looking. As is usual with this stuff, I have gone overboard. I now have seven of those pump motors, and if the one in the bathroom ceiling fan downstairs is the same, I will have eight of them. That fan was squeaking, so it's a good reason to put in a new motor. Of course, if it is not the same, I'll just oil it.

[citfta]

Hi again,

Yes that is the idea. The flywheel is supposed to keep the rotor speed up while the motor is coasting and the battery is being recharged. I am not sure if I have explained my whole set-up on here or not. I have been communicating with Dave (Turion) by email so I may not have posted all I am doing. I am using a set of mosfets to control power to and from the battery. I am charging the cap while the battery is powering the modified scooter motor (Matt's design). Then I am disconnecting the battery from the motor and discharging the cap back to the battery. And then reconnecting the battery to the drive motor. I am controlling the mosfets by a pic chip which I can reprogram easily from my PC. This allows me to change all the variables of the timing. There are just a lot of variables to play with and try out. I realize my generator coils are not what Watson used but they seemed interesting because of the low lenz effect when connected to certain kinds of loads.

Thanks for your input. I appreciate having someone else look at what I am doing and your suggestions.

Later,
Carroll

[gyula]

Okay, so I think we may rule out LC resonance behaviour between the generator coils and the puffer capacitor.
However, one thing is sure: the capacitive loading your puffer cap represents to the two separate generator coils somehow creates a counter field and this latter is not present when a battery is the load or the capacitor is "seen" by one of the coils only.

The loading effect is strange because once the capacitor gets charged up there should not be any significant current flow to or from the capacitor so what may cause the load is hard to think out.
IT is good you have a scope, fortunately the generator coils are totally independent from the mains ground and probably from each other too (there is galvanic separation between them I mean), so there will be no problem to use the common grounds of the scope inputs to cause any error or trouble.

In the meantime I went through John Bedini infos on his 1984 setup (from which Jim Watson built a small and a big replication) and what I found is the energizer as John calls his output coils with the inducing magnets (ie your or Dave's pump motor coils with the rotor magnets) are induced with one pole of the magnets only, not with both poles as you do.
IF you follow Bizzy's setup, maybe he used both poles, I do not know yet because I will go through his info tomorrow and onwards.
And as I figure the control of John's original setup, he interrups the motor input current when the energizer output is loaded and then the output current is interrupted when the motor is ON. The input energy is partly stored in the flywheel when the motor is just off and the induced output energy is stored in a capacitor which is discharged also in a controlled way into a load. This process as a whole is meant (by John) to give extra output over the input I think.

Gyula

[citfta]

Hi Gyula,

I have not tried connecting a 3rd coil and bridge to the cap. I have tried a wide range of rpm with the same result. I have not tried a different cap although I have a pretty good collection of them. The one I have been using is a 800 uf cap. With that large of a cap I wouldn't think I would be hitting any resonant frequencies but something strange is sure going on. I will try something bigger later when I have some time to do some more testing. Thanks for that idea.

Thanks also for the online calculator. I keep forgetting you can find a formula for anything now days online.

I made my living for the last 25 years or so that I worked by troubleshooting electrical and electronic equipment. Mostly CNC machine tools with a wide variety of other electronic equipment thrown in too. I don't give up easily when I see a strange problem. I enjoy a good challenge. Something I also haven't done yet is to look at the signals with a scope. I have a dual trace scope so I can look at the signals from two coils at once. I don't know why I haven't thought to do that before now.

Later this evening I will have some time to do more testing so maybe I will have some more info to share after that.

Take care,
Carroll

[gyula]

Hi Carroll,

Here is a link you can use online to calculate inductive reactance when the L inductance of a coil is known, see the 2nd calculator:
Reactance Calculators - Calculates Capcitance and Inductance from reactance, Inductive Reactance and Capacitive Reactance

and you can figure the frequency from the rotor rpm of course.

Thanks for the info on your tests, sounds strange indeed. Perhaps the two coils and the puffer capacitor are able to form a near resonant circuit (via the diode bridges) at the rpm used and the circulating AC current in the "LC circuit" thus brought about creates a strong counter magnetic field? To check this, try either to alter the RPM significantly or use a different value puffer capacitor at the original RPM. Can you use the 3rd coil too with a 3rd diode bridge and combine the three output into the same puffer cap too or you may have tried this?

Gyula

[citfta]

Hi Gyula,

I spent almost all day yesterday working with this set-up. I did try moving the coils back and forth to change the timing between them. I also tried swapping the AC leads on the bridge rectifiers and every combination of the 3 coils I could come up with. At no time did I find a combination that would let me put the output from 2 bridges into the cap at the same time without severely loading down the drive motor.

I did try putting the output from 2 bridges back to the run battery at the same time and that seemed to load the system only a small amount. Since connecting directly to a battery only loads the system a small amount but connecting to a cap loads the system more I am inclined to believe the problem has to be related to the impedance of the generating coils. I am tempted to rewind one of them as I think someone suggested.

I don't recall which post but somewhere in the last couple of pages I posted the inductance reading I got when measuring one of the coils. Many years ago I could have told you how to calculate the reactance but have long since forgotten that info. Maybe I need to dig out my old ARRL handbook and do some refresher reading.

Enough for now. I am still pondering over the results I have gotten so far.

Later,
Carroll

[gyula]

Hi Carroll,

Unfortunately, I have not tested this setup so cannot give my findings on it. From what Dave described (from the individual observations he spoke with) and what you kindly mentioned, it seems that inductive (and certain resistive) loads can cause the rotor to speed up or at least cause little Lenz drag. A dead short as the "load" is eventually a series R-L load in this setup because the generator coil's own L inductance gets in series with its own DC resistance, R and seeing the many fine wire turns of the gen coils I think the inductive reactance is probably way higher at the applied RPM than the DC resistance. You have used capacitive loading so far of course which also caused little Lenz drag.

What you also found with a second coil, connecting it to the same single puffer capacitor (via a separate diode bridge) is a strange behaviour for sure. Have you tried to position the second coil to elsewhere on the rotor's perimeter? I mean if the first coil is say at the 3 o'clock position and the second coil is at the 4:30 position (as they seem in your latest photo), then what if the second coil would be placed at say 11 or 6 o'clock etc position? Or you may have used the coil placed at the 9 o'clock position and you used one of the two coils at the opposite side and found the drag too?

I will go through the Bizzy thread and also Bedini's 1984 descriptions to get a deeper understanding on this setup.

Thanks
Gyula

[citfta]

Hi Dave,

Applied Magnets® Ceramic Magnets 1 7 8" x 7 8" x 3 8" Block C8 Set of 10 | eBay

Here is a link to Ebay where I got my magnets. 10 of them for $8.85. I ordered 3 sets and then weighed them to get all the same weight on the rotor to make balancing easier. Most of them weighed 50 grams with a couple at 52 grams and a couple at 48 grams. I am still fine tuning and adjusting to see what I can learn from this generator. These coils do act strange. Dead shorted they act almost like they aren't even there. But connect them to a bridge to charge a cap and they do load the system a small amount with one coil connected.

The really strange thing I am trying to figure out is when I connect a second coil to a bridge and then try to connect the output of the bridge to the same cap it loads the system down almost to a standstill. Any one of the coils will charge a cap right up with almost no loading. But as soon as I try to add a second coil and bridge to the same cap it loads everything down badly. I thought I had a bad bridge but they all check fine and I have tried swapping several of them around with no change.

I tried connecting the second bridge to an almost dead battery and it did start charging the battery up with a small amount of loading on the system. So it may be possible to use the output of one of the coils to charge the second primary battery on the 3BGS. The top one that always seems to go down the fastest.

I have never gotten this system to speed up under a load but I haven't been trying anything but charging a cap and dumping back to the battery. And then the test I just did of charging a battery directly off the bridge. I guess I need to find some more loads and see what they do on this system.

Carroll

[Turion]

My magnets were much smaller than the ones Carroll used, and my rotor was plastic. The magnets did not touch. I did use a strip of metal to tie each pair of magnets together however.

I am in the process of building a new rotor right now. It has 11 magnet pairs on it and they will not be connected by anything conductive other than they are touching each other. They are the larger rectangular magnets like Carroll used. If my voltage doesn't seem to be what I want, I have left a way to connect the back of each pair or ALL the pairs of magnets with a metallic strip in the back. It will probably be tomorrow or the next day before I get the rotor completed. I ran out of magnets and need to make another trip to Lowes. I'm not even sure they will have six packages of those rectangular magnets, which is what I need, so I may have to wait a week or so until I can get to the city, or get some delivered by eBay or Amazon.

Another individual I spoke with told me that when he replicated this and passed the magnets between the two points on the stator, the voltage was less but it sped up when inductive or resistive loads were added. When run the way we are running it, (magnets moving across the ends of the points instead of between them) it slowed down with resistive loads and sped up with inductive loads, which is the opposite of what other projects I have built would do. I would much rather have it speed up when inductive loads are added!!!!!! Easier try and loop the setup.

Dave

[gyula]

Hi Carroll,

Okay, so it is the Watson/Bedini machine principle.

Thanks for the picture on your setup. I assume the material of the flywheel is ferromagnetic so the NS magnets next to each other can join their opposing poles (that touch the wheel) via the flywheel, while their other side facing the generator cores can also join their opposing poles in the generator cores (via the air gap) whenever they are aligned.
You wrote in your post #434: "I have noticed that the attraction of the magnets seems to be the strongest when one north pole magnet is over one leg of the coil assembly and one south pole magnet is over the other leg of the coil assembly." This is because in that moment there is a closed magnetic circuit, even though there is an air gap between the magnets and the legs of the generator coil cores. I think if your flywheel is not ferromagnetic, the induced output voltage would be less than it is now (again here I assume your flywheel is ferromagnetic).

This latter detail may partly explain why Dave receives less output in his setup if his rotor is not ferromagnetic (I assume) and the poles on the back side of the magnets that touch the rotors cannot join unless he uses a ferromagnetic back plate embedded in the rotor. Another detail different in Dave's setup is that his magnets are cylindrical and have less facing surface area with respect to the legs of the generator cores, your magnets shape and facing area are much favorable in this respect.

I understand that the generator cores and coils are that of the pump motor parts, however such motor coil may have an unwantedly high DC resistance, a limiting factor in output power when used as generator coils. And if you were to rewind the cores with a thicker wire to reduce copper loss, the output voltage would be less because of the less number of turns the thicker wire lets you fill the same bobbin. This less output could be compensated by using more number of generator coils. Probably the Lenz drag would also be higher with the thicker wire coils though than with the present coils because the charging currents involved would be higher.

Sorry for a little 'rambling', perhaps some info may become useful for those reading this thread.

Gyula

[citfta]

Here is a picture of my crude generator set. Still working on the best balance of motor pulse timing and other things to see if I can get a self charging system like the Watson/Bedini machine. The shaft is from my window motor. I reused it because it has some very nice high speed precision bearings and also already had the flywheel mounted on the end. I just put my magnets around the outside of the flywheel and fastened them down with reinforced strapping tape. So far it is staying together.

Carroll